Fanny & Alexander
Oxford School of Drama, May 2024
It was my pleasure to return to Oxford school of Drama to work on the adaptation by Stephen Beresford of the 1982 film Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman.
The film script is semi-autobiographical where young Alexander is based on Bergman himself with other characters drawn from his family. The work was originally conceived as a television mini series which spanned 312 minutes. A 188 minute cut version was created later for cinematic release and when released received universal critical acclaim.
In adapting the original work for the stage Stephen Beresford did a wonderful job in creating a world seen through the eyes of the two children at the centre of the family: Alexander and his sister Fanny. The work is both worldly and other worldly in which ghosts, spirits and the physical all coexist. Although the characters are anchored in a concrete time and place the text moves effortlessly between the worlds of natural and supernatural, document and dream.
It was a thrilling challenge to try and capture all the nuance and complexity of both the original and the stage adaptation in this epic family drama with the post graduate students in the middle of their one year of study.